What, really, is the point of conserving agricultural biodiversity? The formal sector, genebanks and the like, will say it is about genetic resources and having on hand the traits to breed varieties that will solve the challenges tomorrow might throw up. Thousands of seed savers around the world might well agree with that, at least partially. I suspect, though, that for most seed savers the primary reason is surely more about food, about having the varieties they want to eat. David Cavagnaro has always championed that view. David’s is a fascinating personal history, which currently sees him working on the Pepperfield Project, “A Non-Profit Organization Located in Decorah, IA Promoting and Teaching Hands-On Cooking, Gardening and Agrarian Life Skills”. I first met David 15 or 20 years ago at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah. This year, I was lucky enough to be invited there again, and I lost no time in finding time for a chat.

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David pointed out that immigrants are often keen gardeners and, perforce, seed savers as they struggle to maintain their distinctive food culture in a new land. That’s true for the Hmong in Minneapolis, Asian communities in England and, I’m sure, many others elsewhere. What happens as those communities assimilate? The children and grandchildren of the immigrant gardeners are unlikely to feel the same connection to their original food culture, and may well look down on growing food as an unsuitable occupation. Is immigrant agricultural biodiversity liable to be lost too? Efforts to preserve it don’t seem to be flourishing.

Seed saving for its own sake, rather than purely as a route to sustenance, does seem to be both a bit of a luxury and to require a rather special kind of personality. John Withee, whose bean collection brought David Cavagnaro to Seed Savers Exchange and people like Russ Crow, another of his spritual heirs, collect and create stories as much as they do agricultural biodiversity. And that’s something formal genebanks never seem to document.

Notes

1. John Withee’s bean cookbook looks like it would be very interesting. Indeed, the whole Yankee bean-hole thing would be fun to explore.
2. Are you aware of people adopting “immigrant” foods not just to eat, but to conserve? My mother-in-law had red shiso (Perilla frustescens) volunteers all over the place, although I’m pretty sure she never used it as a herb. The lemongrass on my balcony hardly counts.
3. Can you point me to a public or private bean-hole party that might welcome a nosy reporter?
4. Would you consider reviewing Eat This Podcast on iTunes?
5. Or nominating it for a podcasting award?
6. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could go online and search the internets for a recipe. And you would come up with a few. Just reading them over, they didn’t seem all that appetising. One, for example, warned that you had to serve the bread toasted. What’s the point of that? Anyway, that didn’t deter Ken Albala, a professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, but rather than search the internet, he turned to ancient Egypt for inspiration. In thinking about ways in which the material culture of food might change in the future, for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, he came up with not only the plate that keeps crispy things crunchy, but also a way to bake bread in a microwave. Not great bread, but acceptable bread.

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Why? Well, partly because it is hot where Ken lives, and he doesn’t like putting the oven on just to bake bread. And partly because he foresees a future in which space is at a premium, cooking, maybe, is deskilled, and ovens, where they exist, are used for storing stuff, not baking.

Turns out, though, that there’s method to Ken’s madness. I’d always thought that microwaves heat water molecules and that’s that. Apparently not, as I learned from Len Fisher at Bristol University. Apparently some ceramics absorb microwaves and others don’t, and if you have a ceramic that absorbs microwaves, watch out. It can get very hot. Hot enough to turn bread dough to toast in less than 7 minutes.

Len admitted that he didn’t fully understand the physics of different ceramics in the microwave, which means there’s no chance for me and you. But he did think he’d invented something along the lines of Ken’s bread mould. Turns out someone had already patented it, although as far as I can tell the patent has lapsed and nobody ever did anything with it. Or did they? If you’re aware of a container designed to bake bread in the microwave, please leave a comment.

Notes

1. Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page.
2. Len Fisher also has a website, and it is well worth exploring.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is identical to that of a crispy one. But the experience falls far short of enjoyable. A crisp needs to be, well, crisp. If it isn’t, it actually tastes bad. That’s not quite so true of things like fried or oven-roasted potato chips; they still taste pretty good when they’re not quite so crispy, but they’re even better when they are crispy, and that goes for a whole lot of other cooked crispy things too. Which is why it is such a shame that by the time you get to the bottom of a plateful of fries or nachos, they’re soggy. Not to mention thin-crust pizza in a box. Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California, happens to be an accomplished ceramicist, so he invented a plate that helps keep foods crispy. And that prompted an episode on crispy crunchiness.

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The argument that the appeal of crispiness is innate – that is was selected for by evolution – is not that far-fetched. John S. Allen, a research scientist at the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, writes that “[c]rispy foods are certainly not the only type of food that humans find appealing, and of course some people do not even like them. But the pervasive appeal of crispy is clearly something that emerges out of our multiple, interacting histories”.

There’s more to it than just the texture or the sound of the food breaking in our heads, but there does seem to be something to Allen’s ideas. What, though, is the difference between crisp and crispy? My sister says that, for her, carrots are crisp, while fried noodles are crispy, and that’s an importance distinction, for her. I’m not so sure. I think one could possibly separate out the texture from the flavour, at least experimentally, and see whether there really is a difference. Of course all sorts of sensations affect the experience of eating something, but whatever the truth of the matter, I’d just as soon not have to eat soggy crisps.

Notes

1. Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page.
2. Why Humans Are Crazy for Crispy is an essay by John S. Allen, adapted from his book The Omnivorous Mind.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

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Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as you could hope for. I found out about that because I was checking out her new book, The Resilient Gardener, which offers all kinds of advice for making the most of home-grown food. In that, Carol talks about having bred a delicata squash with a taste like a medjool date. That sounded intriguing, but in a way not all that surprising. If anyone could breed a squash – or pumpkin – that tasted like a date, it would be Carol Deppe. Her earlier book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, is a wonderful, informative and accessible book about the science of plant genetics. It is, in fact, better than all the text books I’ve ever read on the subject. Which is not surprising, as that’s what Deppe set out to write.

The whole business of squashes seems fraught with difficulty. First off, what do you call them: zucchini, pumpkins, courgettes, summer squash, winter squash? Is there any difference (in England) between a baby marrow and a courgette, or between an overgrown zucchini and a marrow? ((Questions to which I returned in 2016: When is a zucchini not a zucchini?)) And calling them by their Latin names doesn’t really help, because the same species can be used in different ways, and it is the usage that tends to determine what they’re called.

The idea of drying a summer squash for use through the winter is very appealing, and Carol says that costata romanesco, and old Italian heritage variety, is one of the few varieties suitable for treating in this way. Looking at pictures, it does seem to be very similar to the variety I see on the market here, so I’m determined now to see whether I can persuade my local vegetable seller to bring me an overgrown zucchini – a zuchone, or just a zucca? He’ll probably think I’m mad, when everybody else wants them as tiny as possible.

Notes

1. The Resilient Gardener is published by Chelsea Green Publishing.
2. A keen amateur breeder called Rebsie Fairholm was doing wonderful things breeding a purple-podded mange-tout pea, inspired and informed by Carol Deppe’s work. Alas, she seems to have stopped for now, although you can still read about her efforts on her website.
3. Banner photo by McBeth.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
5. Outro music, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn, is Tonight, tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins. Sometimes obvious is good.

Italy, land of fabled wines, has seen an astonishing craft beer renaissance. Or perhaps naissance would be more accurate, as Italy has never had that great a reputation for beers. Starting in the early 1990s, with Teo Musso at Le Baladin, there are now more than 500 craft breweries in operation up and down the peninsula. Specialist beer shops are popping up like mushrooms all over Rome, and probably elsewhere, and even our local supermarket carries quite a range of unusual beers. Among them four absolutely scrummy offerings from Mastri Birai Umbri – Master Brewers of Umbria. And then it turns out that my friend Dan Etherington, who blogs (mostly) at Bread, cakes and ale, knows the Head Brewer, Michele Sensidoni. A couple of emails later and there we were, ready for Michele to give us a guided tour of the brewery.

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Mastri Birai Umbri is owned by the Farchioni family, which has become a powerhouse in basic agricultural products since the late 18th century. Farchioni olive oil is ubiquitous, and their flour only slightly less so, and while the quality of these products is high, they’re not the sorts of commodities I associate with a craft brewery. But I am starting to rethink the casual opposition between “industrial” and “craft” or “artisanal”. It’s true that industrial food processes are often soulless, repetitive and designed to serve only the bottom line, degrading the notion of quality about as far as it will go before people revolt. But my conversation with Michele showed me that it is possible to take an industrial approach to the production of a high-quality product. He insists on repeatability – that the brew should taste the same each batch and present the drinker with the same experience each time. That is probably the major distinction from a more artisanal or craft approach that instead of stomping out all the differences uses a different kind of skill to allow the product to vary slightly from batch to batch. The quality of Michele’s beer, however, is unimpeachable.

The other big distinction, I suppose, is quantity. When I asked him what the future might hold for craft beers in Italy, Michele thought it unlikely that 500 breweries could survive, because many are too small to compete. But why should that matter? If you’re big enough to survive at some scale, perhaps only in a local market, do you have to keep growing. This is one of those eternal business mysteries that I’ve seldom heard explained to my satisfaction. Why is perpetual growth necessary? Of course, demand may increase. But if you’re making as much as you want to and need to, and don’t want to regulate demand by increasing the price, that’s an opportunity for someone else to enter the market. You don’t have to do it yourself.

All of which is probably a bit deep for a consideration of well-made beers. In any case, I think I need to stop using “industrial” as a term of opprobrium and focus instead on the product, rather than the means of production.

Notes

1. Le Baladin is a somewhat strange enterprise, and I am not as familiar with their beers as I would like to be. Their design sense is definitely quite odd. As Dan says, “It’s kinda scrappy, cartoony, vaguely Keith Haring, vaguely hippy, like someone’s mate did it, someone who’s not a professional designer. But remember kids, don’t judge a beer by its label.”
2. No link to the Farchioni website, because it autoplays noise, and I hate that.
3. The whole pure yeast vs wild fermentation debate is fascinating. Here’s a recent account from Australia: Winemakers turn to wild fermentation.
4. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.